


Ultraviolence

by raffinit



Category: The Last of Us
Genre: AU where Tess used to run a "personal" business and Joel asks for some of her time, F/M, been sitting on this for about a year, it's angst as shit and you know that's the only way to go
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-09
Updated: 2016-05-15
Packaged: 2018-04-30 19:35:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 8
Words: 9,814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5177135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raffinit/pseuds/raffinit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Here he is. All over again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. time

**Author's Note:**

> the Lady-love and I have a library of AUs for these assholes, and this was one of the ones we've been recently adding to more than the rest because. Tess runs a business, like she always does. It's just a different kind of business.

It starts like a business deal.

He has no idea how to approach her about this; he’s seen other men do it - they make it look easy, to just walk up to her and ask for her time. A lot of the times, he keeps back, watches them from a distance at the way they leer and grin at her and offer up cards. She looks at them first, unmoved, unimpressed, and for the longest moment he watches the arch of her thin brow curve superciliously before a wry, crooked smile spreads across her lips.

The barest jerk of her chin; she settles a time and date - not them. He’s not much for lip-reading, but his hearing hasn’t let him down yet.

“ _Tomorrow night. After curfew_.” The man doesn’t seem pleased with this, but he bobs his head obligingly, and it is the first time Joel finds the courage to do something other than stare.

“‘scuse - ‘scuse me.” He clears his throat, wipes his palms on the rough of his jeans and hopes he doesn’t stink like the garage still. She turns her head to him as if she could be surprised by his presence. Up close, he begins to notice the brand of freckles over her nose and cheekbones, the jut of a battered box of cigarettes tucked into the back pocket of her jeans.

He thinks to want to make comment about bad habits, but finds himself missing the taste more.

She looks at him almost indifferently, appraising him the way a soldier might to an urchin kid of the streets. Her arms are lean as she folds them over her chest, leans back against the wall of the building with a leg bent up for leverage.

“Somethin’ I can do for you?” she asks him casually, tilting her head back. It’s not quite dusk yet, but over the corners and arches of the buildings and billboards the warm light spills down the alleyway, and she is illuminated purple and orange.

He thinks to wonder if her hair is as red as it seems.

Joel reaches for his cards, pulls them into sight, and her brow arches high at the sheer number of them.

“‘f I could - have a moment of your time,” he mumbles, and his eyes can’t pull higher than the frayed, faded seams of her shirt.

She’s quiet for a long moment; he is motionless before her, and eventually Joel starts to pull his hand back awkwardly, an apology at his lips, but he hears the harsh grating sound of her boot pushing off the wall.

He looks up.

She jerks her head towards the building. “Come on.”

\-----

He doesn’t know what he’d expected of her apartment when he sees it. Perhaps he had thought that she wouldn’t have had a real bed, a real anything - he’s surprised that she lets the men come to her apartment altogether. But she does; she gestures to the bed, the rumpled sheets and the overturned crate as a bedside table. “Sit down,” she says. “We’ll talk shop.”

He perches himself on the edge of her bed almost gingerly, rubs his palms over his thighs again as he watches her move around the room. There are things scattered around the room; clothes, boxes of rations, empty bottles and pieces of paper full of lists.

She lights a cigarette, and turns to him. “So. I take cards. That’s it. No trades, no IOUs, no favours.”

He nods. “Alright,” he says, and looks at her almost shyly. “‘s there uh - ‘s there anythin’ you - you don’t do?”

She seems to think about it. “No ass,” she tells him firmly, and then - “no kissing, either.”

He’s a little taken aback by the abruptness of it - Tess has this businesslike air about her that’s confusing when they’re talking that kind of shop. He thinks back to his question. He hadn’t wanted to come off that way to her. He watches as her lips close around the cigarette and then makes his first mistake; he imagines how it might feel to kiss them.

(Soft? He thinks she might be the type to close her teeth around his lower lip and tug before she leans away.)

“Okay.” He nods, his hands gripping the edge of the mattress. He looks anywhere but her then - at the sheets, at the rumpled, thin blanket over the top.

“And those are firm limits,” she reiterates, narrowing her eyes at him through the curling fumes of the cigarette. “No pushing it. I will not see you again if you do. Understood?”

“Yes ma’am,” he says without thinking; he thinks the corner of her mouth might twitch.

“Not from around here, are you,” she says, her voice a mutter and a grin, her lips straight.

“Well -” he starts, but Tess shakes her head.

“Wasn’t a question.” She stands up. “Look. We don’t need to get into anything personal, okay? We can start and finish with names.”

“Joel,” he says, rubbing his palms on his jeans and sticking out a hand. “Joel Miller.”

“Tess.” She nods, curt and guarded, and shakes his hand shortly. She motions to his jeans, and the way she smirks at him changes the entire movement of her face. “So - what’s on the menu for you?”

He flushes, and she almost wants to smile or laugh - she hasn’t seen a man blush in a while. They’re all usually red-faced for different reasons. “W-ell,” he clears his throat, and Tess sees his hands curling against his thighs. “Well, I was gonna say - you got a policy about - how we finish?”

She arches a brow. “We finish when I say we finish.”

He bobs his head. “‘course, but I mean - like - _finish_.” He looks at her pointedly.

Tess blinks. “Oh. Well.” She shrugs. “Whatever way that gets you there, I guess.”

Joel swallows. Might as well get it out there. “I wanna come inside you.”

It’s the first time he seems to have surprised her. Her eyes go wide for a moment and she sort of whips around to face him. “What?” she says, her voice dangerously low, and Joel clears his throat.

“I wanna come inside you,” he repeats.

There’s a small flush of color on her cheeks. “Well - that - isn’t something I usually do,” she says, her voice rather lofty. “We can see how you do the first few times, mm?” She watches him, appraisingly, her cigarette dangling from between her fingers. “I have a few clients who can request certain things. But I’ve never allowed that yet.”

“Well,” he says, shuffling slightly on the bed. “I mean - first for - everything.”

She looks at him, saying nothing, giving nothing away from the look on her face. She is surprisingly blank. The cigarette hisses and burns in her fingers, and she moves away, snuffs it on a blackened broken bowl. She turns back to him, and when he looks into her face he sees the wall there again.

“Lean back. Drop your pants. Don’t move.”

He obeys almost anxiously, hesitant in the way he unbuttons his jeans and shucks them low over his thighs. In the low light of the bedroom, she sees the musculature of his thighs; he’s strong, obviously, roped with muscle in ways that would at some point concern her. For now though he leans back submissively, fumbling for the elastic of his briefs.

She sees the bulge of him press through the fabric, half-hard with a dark trail of hair tapering down over his belly. He spills out, heavy and thick, and Tess arches a brow appraisingly. She watches him palm himself self-consciously, stroking himself almost, and she realizes he is circumcised.

"Well," she says. "That's something you don't see everyday."

Joel blushes. His cock is almost at full-mast already, and she is impressed enough to reach forward, grasp him in her hand and stroke.

He's almost too big to get her hand all the way around.

But when she kneels before him, he sits up. “Wait -”

“I don’t fuck on the first date,” she says. and when she takes him into her mouth, he can’t find a way to stop her. 


	2. Chapter 2

He can't find a way to stop her from doing lots of things; from maintaining that rule she has about no nights spent, the one that leaves him anxious when he gets home, hoping she's okay, that she locked the door behind him after he left.

That first night, when he manages to stagger to his feet, Tess wipes her mouth nonchalantly and pours herself a glass of scotch while he redressed himself. “Shit,” he rasps.

A wry smile quirks her lips. “‘s a pretty good price for that, isn't it?”

“Can't put a price on that,” he says. 

“Well,” Tess says, with that same wry smile, “‘s my job, after all.”

\-----

He finds his way back to her again within the week. It was inevitable, somehow; he couldn’t help himself. It was as if he was led to her doorstep by some visceral force; a thread caught between the fabric of his chest, winding itself into the muscle of his heart and tugging, tugging up to his throat reeling him in through the streets and alleyways and weaving up the broken, creaking steps of the townhouse. 

Here he is, all over again. Staring at the chipped, rotten paintwork of her door. 

He lifts a hand to knock. The hollow sound of it tells him that this door isn’t going to survive a solid boot and a man behind it to kick if he wanted to, and he wonders of the ways he could get his hands on a decent door to give to her. 

It’s just a matter of security, he tells himself. Being safe in the Zone also means having to have something more solid than moldering wood. 

The door cracks open and mossy green eyes peer out at him sharply. There’s a flicker of something in her eyes; recognition, surprise, amusement, all three that flashes in the golden flecks of her eyes. The chain sounds, and the door slide open wider.

Tess leans against the doorframe of it with a shoulder, smirking at him as her eyes move from head to toe of him. “Well,” she says slowly, the same drawling, lilting tone to her voice; as if she had known all along, was expecting him. “Take it you’re here for another session.”

Joel shifts on the balls of his feet, distracts himself from the flush rising over his neck by shoving his hands into his pockets and pulling out a stack of ration cards - he’s been saving up for this. “Was wonderin’ ‘f you - had some time,” he mumbles, feeling suddenly like he’s fourteen again, a too-tall ninth grader with patchy fuzz. 

She looks at him for a long moment, saying nothing, giving nothing away in the way she folds her arms over her chest and leans deeper into the doorframe. The neckline of her shirt parts over her chest, cut down too wide, and he sees the jut and curve of her clavicle. 

He’s just about ready to bolt, but she steps back, jerks her head back into the apartment. 

“Come on,” she says, amusement coloring her words as she turns away, and Joel follows the trail of her padding footsteps and the coy look she gives him over her shoulder.

 

\-------

Word on the street is that Tess never lets him spend the night. 

They've seen him around many times; skulking around in the night, dark eyes flitting across the alleyway, a bearded scowl at anyone remotely close to him. They see him in the mornings, ass-crack of dawn early; disheveled and shoving his shirt back into his jeans. 

They never ask what he goes to her for. It goes without saying, why he goes to her under the cover of night. 

"Fuck, Tess, just lemme take the couch. Just once." He rolls off her, groaning, sweating on the sheets as he stares up at the peeling wallpaper cut out in the shape of Louisiana somehow. 

Tess sits up, grabs for the glass of scotch off the bedside table; downs it as she scowls down at the mess between her legs. She says nothing of it, wipes it away on the sheets tangled around her waist. 

It's what he pays double for. 

"You know the rules. Get out."

Joel sighs. "Come on, I'm fuckin' drained -"

"Not my problem, Tex. You come here to fuck, not to sleep over."

He stares hard at the curve of her back, pale and bony; he wonders about the scars but he know better than to ask. "You're a real mean bitch sometimes, y'know that." He pushes the sheets back, fumbles for his jeans.

Tess almost laughs, breathy and harsh. "That's rich, coming from the guy who pays to fuck." 

He grits his teeth and scowls at her, reaches for his pockets. He throws his price onto the sheets, the ration cards scattering over the damp covers. "Maybe if you offered somethin' other than a good fuck, I'd take offense." 

"Fuck you," she spits, and Joel barely dodges the bottle flung in his direction. "Get the fuck out and stay out." 

He leaves her in the early light again, swearing that he's done with this shit, he's done with her. If his mother was alive to know what he's paying Tess for, he's sure she would've rolled in her grave all the way back down to Texas.

They see him again the next week, this time with a fresh bottle of scotch and a new pack of ration cards.


	3. Chapter 3

Sometimes he sees new bruises on her skin. Greedy hands and meaty fists that leave black and blue welts on the bones of her hips, her ribs, bruises ringed around her arms. "Jesus, Tess," he says, when they're caught between the sheets and she's wincing every time he thrusts. It's hard to hide the worry, the ache in his voice as he tries to touch the bruises gently, is rebuked by a slap to his hands or a hard jerk away from him. "Don't you ever stop 'em?" 

Tess shrugs, looks at everything but his face. "Look, just hurry up and finish, alright?" she sighs. "'s Friday, the ration lines close early today."

"You can't just let 'em beat you silly -."

"Mind your own damn business," she snaps at him, and for a moment their eyes meet in the dim light of the candles perched on her bedside table. She looks away first, and Joel feels her kicking him away, the grimace on her mouth as he slips out of her. "We're done. Get out."

He stares at her. Watches as she fumbles for the bottle of scotch again, swigs a hearty gulp from it. She's hunched over the side of the bed, and from this angle he can see exactly how much she's let these assholes take from her. 

"Here." He rummages through his rucksack, tosses the pill bottle onto the bed beside her. "Take 'em. 's supposed to be Vicodin or somethin'. Painkillers." He pulls out a handful of cards, tightly wound in a rubberband and tosses them onto the bedside table. 

“Forget it,” she says, and Joel watches her frame tremble slightly as she reaches for another glass of scotch. “No charge tonight.”

Joel stares at her back for a moment before he pulls his jeans back on and tugs his shirt over his shoulders. He turns to the door, and Tess glances behind her when the door slides shut quietly. She reaches for the pill bottle, and as she stumbles her way to the bathroom, she sees the stack of ration cards sitting on the bedside table. 

\-------

She’s got a mouth on her in more ways than one, that’s for sure. He can’t wrap his head around how good she is with her mouth, or tongue, or how she manages to take him as deep as she does and swallows when he comes on her tongue and down her throat. He never asks her for it, never weaves his hand into her hair and fucks her face like he knows most of them do to her, but Tess always starts with his cock in her mouth and her hands on his ass. 

“You’re one of the rare few who make it past the cocksucking,” she tells him one night, deep into her cups; she slurs, and he sees the flush ride the curve of her cheekbones as she looks up at him through hazy green eyes. “Most of ‘em finish and can’t get it back up. You come like a fucking hose -.”

“Alright, come on.” He pulls her back up off her knees, wipes the corner of her mouth with his thumb before he registers it. His ears are burning, but Tess stumbles into him, shoving him back towards the bed, and he feels her mouth press to his, tastes himself against her tongue as she straddles him, and he can’t think to ask her how many of them have held her neck so hard that they bruise her like this? 

She’s on her knees tonight; it’s one of his favorite positions - there’s something so strangely sensual about the way she arches her back, the curve of her spine and her hips as he fucks into her. He knows that it’s lewd, too, knows that sometimes the other men shove her head into the pillows and fuck her like this, but it’s different. He palms her hips and pulls her to him, but never spans over the healing bruises and welts he sees mottled across her back and shoulders.

He finishes inside her, it's what he pays for, and when she's lying on her stomach, trembling from an orgasm he gives her on the rare occasion, he asks her if she's ever had a doctor look at her bruises. 

Tess shrugs, closes her legs even as his come is dribbling out of her onto the sheets. She reaches down and rubs over her folds idly, as if gauging the size of the load inside her. "No doctor out there willing to help women like me. Think they'd like it better if I found a dumpster to die in." 

He shakes his head at her words, stunned by the casual way she mentions it; "what about if you ever - if something ever  _ caught _ -" 

"I'm as clean as they'll get," she says, quite sharply, and Joel shakes his head as he reaches for his jeans. 

"I meant like - 'f you ever got knocked up."

Tess blinks, as if the thought had never occurred to her. "Oh. Well don't worry about it." She shrugs again, grabs a cigarette off the table and lights it over a candle. Her words swirl in wisps of white and grey around her. "Don't think I can at this point; if I haven't already. Probably better that way."

He purses his lips and watches her, the curve of her shoulders as she inhales, the glare of red from the embers of the cigarette; the dusky pink of her nipples. 

"You should head out," she says suddenly, jerking her head at the setting sunlight through her dingy window. "'s gonna be curfew soon." 

He mumbles something, and slips her the stack of ration cards together with an energy bar. 

"See you around, Tess," he murmurs, and the door slides shut behind him quietly.


	4. bruises

He’s seen her around sometimes; in the “real” world, outside of the sequestered space of her apartment, in alleyways and marketplaces. It’s not often, not when he’s putting in hours at the yard, but he knows he’s seen her there, plying whatever trade she makes. On his off-days, he takes to walking the wharf, and when he’s not spending his nights drinking and fucking with her, he’s watching from the shadows as she disappears around corners with shady men from the wharf. He says nothing as they stumble back, the man barely zipping himself, and Tess spitting come onto the sidewalk. 

“You got a job in the mornin’ or you just sit around drinkin’ all day?” he asks her one night; it’s storming outside, the windows rattle and slam as the rain beats down on them like bullets, and Tess had been generous enough to let him wait it out. 

Tess glances at him sidelong, the smoke of her cigarette curling around her fingers. "I got enough to do," is all she says.

Tonight he’d asked her to let him give her head, go down on her and taste her, and Tess had looked at him so stunned he wondered if he’d asked her to marry him.

She says yes, and it’s the first time he’s ever heard her make the sounds she makes when she’s writhing on his tongue and coming against it. 

Sweet, somehow, and salty; heady enough to linger on his tongue after he's left her tangled in the sheets and reeling from a hard fuck. 

\---------- 

It's the black eye that gets his blood boiling. 

"Jesus, Tess," he breathes, but she looks away, turns onto her knees. It's pitiful, suddenly, shameful that she would think that it would be alright for him to fuck her even as she's riddled in new bruises and beaten so badly she can barely see out of one eye. 

He grasps her arm gently, pulls away just as quickly when she flinches almost expectantly. "Just - fuck Tess - lemme see." 

She shakes his grip off, pushes him down instead to straddle him. "Should see the other guy," she says. 

Joel thinks he'd probably kill the other guy. 

"Tess." He sees her sigh and lean back, and Joel reaches for the glass on the table. "Lemme get some ice or somethin' -." 

There’s no ice in the apartment, not much food either, but Joel thinks to ask her about that some other time. Instead he sees a glass sitting in the freezer, frozen slightly to the bottom, so he pulls it free, wraps it in the cleanest rag he can find. “Here.” He slips it into her hand, perches on the edge of the bed and watches as she mumbles a thanks, presses it gingerly to her eye. It cuts at him when she winces, but he hands her the scotch instead. 

“‘m still chargin’ you by the hour for this, you know,” she says, in that dry, dulcet way of hers; the voice is what gets the men first, he knows. If it isn’t her body, it’s the whiplash-wit of hers, the unabashed, unfiltered vocabulary she spits at her clientele. For some, it lures them. For others it leans into their fists as they beat her into the bed.

He grunts. “You rob me blind one way or another. Doesn’t make a difference.” She snorts, and for a moment they sit on the mess of sheets, awkward, tongue-tied. They’re not made for these moments; they don’t work this way - he doesn’t say much, and she doesn’t expect him to, and for that he is grateful, most times. 

Tonight he tries to find it in himself to speak to her.

“He do this often?”

Tess shrugs. “They figure out what they want when they get here.”

He looks down at the sheets; the curve of her calves and the dip of her ankles and toes. “You should figure out some kind of protection. Body guard -.”

“You mean a pimp,” she drawls wryly, and her smile is acerbic as she holds out the scotch bottle. “I don’t work that way, Tex. Don’t need a man tellin’ me who to fuck and when and how, not unless he’s the one paying me.” 

He sighs, and they sit again in the silence, watching the shadows of military patrols trundling by under her window. 

For the rest of the night, he sits with her, until Tess gets tired of him, and he leaves her apartment at the ass-crack of dawn again.

 

\----------

He can barely stand on his own two feet, but somehow he finds his way to her apartment, stumbles over broken sidewalks and twining weeds and beats against the solid wooden door while he smothers a hiccup. It’s not that bad, he thinks; he’s more sober than he seems to be, he’s sure. It takes more than just a bottle of Johnny’s moonshine to kick him on his ass. 

She opens the door half-dressed, like she always does. Something about the way the tank top strap slips off her shoulders and the way her nipples peek through the material of it makes his cock jolt tonight. She arches an eyebrow at the sight of him. “How much did you have, old man?”

He shrugs, leaning against the doorframe heavily. “Not ‘nough for a whiskey dick,” he says, and Tess rolls her eyes at him, but she steps back. He staggers slightly when he steps into her apartment, but he reaches for her, palms the curve of her hips in his hand warmly, rubbing his thumb just over the skin there. 

“‘f I paid you ‘nough, ‘ll you lemme kiss you?” he murmurs to her, and Tess tilts her head up at him, smirking at the smell of liquor on his breath, but her eyes are hooded and warm on his face. 

She hums, slides her fingers over the neckline of his shirt, rubs over the hair on his chest. “Depends on the kinda payment you’re talkin’ about,” she says, but she leans up, and he leans down before he knows it, and their lips meet.

They taste like liquor, both; scotch thick and sweet on her tongue, and his bitter and sharp like moonshine, but he groans and presses her to the wall, slams her there and can’t quite get his hands on her skin fast enough. He slips her clothes off in between the gasping moans that fall from her lips, and he feels her hands slipping down to his cock, squeezing through his jeans. 

He presses her down onto the bed, breathless, reeling, but he feels her pussy wet against his thigh, the pink of her nipples as they pebble and rub against his chest. One of his hands can span most of her chest, could grip over her neck, but he grasps her breast, rubs his thumb over a nipple as he rubs his cock over her folds, slicks it in her come. 

He slips his fingers over her, puts them to his mouth and tastes her. “Spread your legs,” he husks, deep and wanton, even if he slurs his words. “Wanna taste you again.”

She looks almost amused, apprehensive as she spreads her legs and trembles when he presses his lips to the inside of her thigh, peppers hot kisses over the sensitive skin there. Soft, delicate kisses; hard and greedy - he puts his tongue to her and she gasps, grinds up to his face as he laps between her folds, sucks at her clit. Even drunk, he’s better than a lot of what she’s felt before, even if it’s messy and heavy-handed; even if he grips her ass so tight she’ll find bruises there tomorrow. 

Tess pants and keens, twists the sheets in her hands as he spreads her open with his fingers, presses his tongue inside her and strokes her walls. He only stops after she’s come, twice, on his tongue and fingers, and when she’s sapped of energy and limp on the sheets, he sucks the taste of her off his fingers and wipes his mouth against her thigh.

“‘s that what you came here for?” she asks him, hazy, giddy as he slumps onto the bed beside her. “A kiss and a snack?”

Joel grunts, palms his cock idly. His eyelids are heavier, his bones weary on the ragged mattress. Somehow it’s the most comfortable thing. “Can you take an IOU?”

He hears her laugh quietly, warm, dulcet, and she rolls over to look at him. It’s just enough for him to see her from the edge of his periphery. “Tell you what, old man,” she says. “Consider this a reciprocity.” She runs her fingers over his cock, her hands warm as she grips him. 

It’s quick work to get him to finish, and when she’s sitting on her thighs and wiping her mouth, she tells him that  _ just once _ , she’ll let him sleep it off on the couch.


	5. pipe dream

Tommy begins to grow suspicious of his brother’s nighttime activities, especially when he begins to realize that their stash of liquor and ration cards are depleting rather extensively. “‘s she really that good of a fuck?” he asks bitterly, but all Joel will spare him is a brutal look. 

“You get your share,” Joel says. “What’s it matter to you how I spend mine?”

“It matters if you’re gonna start dippin’ into  _ my  _ share of things,” Tommy says, and scowls at his brother’s back. It’s just after graveyard shift; too late in the night to visit Tess, and too early in the morning to be able to sneak through patrol. 

The younger of the two men leans against the wall, folds his arms and watches as his brother slumps heavily onto his bedroll, snatches the bottle of gin off the table. “Maybe I oughta pay her a visit too,” Tommy spits, sneering at Joel when the older man’s eyes blaze at him. “Gotta be some kind of girl to rob you like she does. Maybe she’ll do doubles -”

“You shut your damn mouth,” Joel snarls, and Tommy feels a rush - anger, fear, a bitter glee at riling his brother up. “Mind your damn business, boy, or I’ll knock you off your feet.”

“Sounds like she’s everyone’s business at this point,” he says. “Mama always said you had to share, Joel -”

And suddenly, Joel is upon him, his fists clenched into the collar of Tommy’s shirt, seething through his teeth as he slams his little brother into the shelving. His eyes are nearly black on Tommy’s face, his knuckles white on his shirt as Tommy kicks out, spitting at him viciously. 

“You have  _ no idea _ ,” Joel growls dangerously, his face inches from Tommy’s. “No  _ fuckin’ _ clue what the hell you’re talkin’ about.” He drops Tommy, stares hard at his brother for a moment, and then he makes to turn away, trembling still. 

Tommy glares at his back, kicks a box. “Just like you to fall in love with a  _ whore _ .”

The next thing he knows, he’s on the ground, reeling, and he feels blood running from his nose. Joel is hovering over him, hissing so close to his face he can feel the spittle on his cheek. 

“Don’t you  _ ever  _ call her a whore again.” It’s the last thing Joel says to Tommy for a while, and the next time he goes to Tess, he brings her his usual liquor and cards, and a small, fragile wildflower. 

\--------------

Sometimes he daydreams about kissing her. Little kisses up and down her shoulders and then quickly apologizing like he forgot the rule when he never does. 

He asks her one day if she’d like to get something to eat, cash in a few of those cards. “You crazy?” she asks him, half-snorting. “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea, Tex.”

She kicks the blankets over herself, wraps them around her legs so that they twist and turn in white sculpture around her.

 

\------------

Sometimes they go to the ration line together. They stand apart; Tess is rather competitive in that line and seems to enjoy being first. It isn’t until much later that he realizes it’s only partway about competing; getting to the front first means she has a guarantee of rations rather than making it to the end of the line and finding the soldiers carting off empty boxes and trays and casually aiming their guns in the general direction of the crowd until they disperse, disheartened and disgruntled. 

“Ugh, can’t understand how you eat that shit,” she says to him, making a face at the stick of jerky he pulls out of his box. They’re lucky this time around; they’ve gotten a box apiece, and Tess makes an inventory of her goods almost as soon as they get back to her apartment. 

Joel shrugs, chewing on the briny meat. It’s leathery and a little tough, but it’s salty and vaguely meatlike. “‘s good enough for me,” he says, and they begin their usual trade.

“‘ll give you the jerky for the chicken noodle soup.” She waves the pair of jerky strips in front of him, and he takes it readily, passes her his share of soup and watches as she scribbles it down on a notepad. She tucks it back by the rest of the canned goods - bean chili, beef stew, and a variety of canned vegetables they heat in their FRHs. 

He’s learned that Tess hates chili and won’t touch anything other than the dehydrated soup packs she gets. Most of her goods, she sells off - for guns, for cards, for anything more substantial to her than a proper meal. She’s a shrewd businesswoman, he realizes, keeps only the barest necessities and hawks the rest away. Once she’d gotten her hands on a slab of meat -  _ real _ meat; something from deer or cow or the rare free-roaming goats that seem to appear out of nowhere and chew up the upholstery of the beaten down cars. 

She’d given it to him, “dunno what to do with it, anyway,” and shrugged when he’d stared at her as if she was two-headed and speaking in tongues. Tess smirked at him, told him that he’d best appreciate it before she ruined it with a hacked up Missouri sweet drizzle.

He made it dry-rub, good Texan-style barbecue cooked on a hubcap over a fire, and on his next visit to her, she finds him at her doorstep with a hubcap full of meat and fucking  _potatoes_. 

"Haven't eaten like that since..." Tess blows out a breath, sweaty and damp, laughing quietly as she pushes her hair out of her face. Joel looks at her with something like a giddy grin, one that she smirks at in return, and his hand spans across the diamond of her ribcage, strokes his thumb over the divot of her bellybutton. 

"Doesn't feel like you've been eaten like anythin' much at all," he murmurs at her, and Tess smacks his hand away when it ventures lower, instead pushing him back against the pillows to straddle him. 

She hovers there idly, hair falling over their faces in a curtain as she pins his wrists down, squeezing slightly as she rolls her hips against the already semi-hard length of his cock. "I've never heard you complainin' about the way I eat _you_ ," she purrs, and Joel feels the blood rush straight down between his legs. 

"Well 'f that's how you get your protein, honey, who'm I to get in the way of that?"


	6. liquor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> tess takes to the bottle this time

 

 

Before that first time he had often made excuses to meet her in the morning. It seemed rather ridiculous, to leave in the early hours of the morning and return once the sun came up; but he would grant her any privacy and she seems to like that time to herself. Before he goes, Joel shuts the door to her bedroom; he replaces old pillows on the couch, he closes the cabinets, he shuts the curtains to the impending light, and he makes sure to lock the door on his way out. Sometimes he tells her he has a hookup, that they can get some good canned stuff from the black markets that run wild underground, roots and mapworks that trail through the city like black-blood veins. Tess always shows up - he’s never known her to renege on a deal before - and sometimes, if he’s lucky, he can get her to sit down and let him cook her something to eat.

But those moments are few and far between, and mostly Joel is lucky if she gives him a second glance before he leaves for the night.

Tess wants to tell him so many things.

Instead she thinks them to herself after he leaves, considers telling them to the drafty wooden walls of the shitty apartment building where she has her creaky bed and layers of blankets to keep out the cold. She didn’t always do this - it started as stripping, offering little teases and trinkets in exchange for shelter. She should have known that it wouldn’t be enough, especially once the world got a little more wild, a little more cruel than it already was. She says, or would say if she ever spoke of it, that she got into the business by accident, which is true. She didn’t mean to have that very first customer force himself on her in an alleyway, grinding her bare ass into the cold stone and running rainwater and sludge over her jeans. But when she’d demanded payment he had seemed taken aback - laughed, even, and thrown her his ration card as he’d zipped up his jeans.

It’s all she takes now. Once, payment was shelter, or they’d try to give her a kiss and call it even, or fantastic promises she knew they had no intention of keeping.

From Joel, however, she accepts alcohol in place of ration cards. He gives her so many, anyways, that she can barely keep up. (Sometimes she wonders what the hell he does with himself to be so rich, but she’s never thought to ask.) Joel is reluctant to hand her scotch and watch her down it - he likes to think he’s doing her a favor by keeping it, she thinks - but this changes when she offers to split it with him before a fuck one night. “That’s payment, okay? You split it with me,” she says. “Okay?” It takes a few tries to appease him, usually.

They split the bottle 70/30, or maybe 80/20, which is how Tess wanted it but is jarring all the same, especially on an empty stomach. “I gotta go - bed,” she slurs quietly, shoving a hand through her hair and leaning heavily against the doorframe to the bedroom.

“Whiskey dick,” he says, nudging her, grinning.

“You can’t tease me,” she replies, narrowing her eyes at him. She turns squarely to face him, though, her eyes level and her body open to him.

“You gonna go to bed?” he asks her, his voice softer and more serious now. “You’ll need some water or somethin’, won’t you?”

“Fuck, why?” Tess groans, leaning back against the doorjamb. She doesn’t quite think about what she’s saying, but her inner monologue says _who cares, fuck it, I mean, it’s not like it’s that crazy of a thing to say anyways_ “for someone who pays to fuck me why do you even give a shit...so much?”

Perhaps, if Joel were prone to melodrama, or if he were drunk instead, or if he hadn’t known that Tess would react badly to it, he would have told her that he cares about her, that he can’t explain it, that he doesn’t want her to do this any more and shouldn’t she just come to his place instead, no matter how much he knows, he knows she would say no what are you talking about.

Instead Joel just watches her as she sags a little against the doorway, looking broody and dark and staring at her bed. “C’mon,” he says, soft, “go on, Tess, get in bed...sleep it off, mm?”

“I don’t,” Tess starts. She lets that hang in the air. _I don’t need to,_ she’s supposed to continue. Instead she palms his chest, the soft flannel of his shirt, the cold metal buttons made warm from sitting against his skin; she tugs hard and clumsily and presses her lips to his when he leans forwards, breaking her cardinal rule, messy because she’s drunk. What a waste of a kiss, she thinks later; if she had to break the rule, if she had to ruin it, at least she could have been sober enough to enjoy it, to do a good job of it.

As it is she stumbles back, and her eyes widen for a moment like she knows just what she’s done, and then she heads to the bed, peels off her jeans and climbs under the covers. “You can come back tomorrow,” she tells him. Joel is still standing there - if she would turn and look Tess would see not confusion but desire on his face, aching, wanting, not carnal or bestial like some of the lesser pleasures they take. Tender and ferocious, a need borne of some deep hole bored into his heart long ago.

Joel waits to be sure she’s adequately covered. He shuts the bedroom door quietly on his way out. As he walks through the living room he looks at all the small traces of Tess there - there aren’t many in her place, almost as if she doesn’t want to have to be there for too long, but there are just enough for someone who looks closely. Scattered lists, the scotch bottles neatly lined up on the countertop, glasses stacked in the sink alongside plates and tarnished silverware. The worn books stacked on a chair that Joel wants badly to touch, a tingling in his fingertips as he reaches for one and then pulls back. It is hers, not his. He can come back in the morning.

He locks the door, pulls it shut, and sleeps in the hallway.


	7. daydreaming

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> joel is the romantic type

He likes to watch the curve of her back when she turns away from him. The long, pale swoop of it, the way her shoulders move as she pushes the covers off of herself. He likes to watch her legs, long and lithe as she swings them over the side of the bed. Hands curling around the bottle of scotch as she pours two glasses, the worn, soft pads of her fingertips tracing over the label. The smell of her hair when he presses his face there as he comes - sometimes he takes her as she sits on the countertop, other times as she lies back against the pillows, and he can feel the intimacy there as her fingers dance over his back.

He wants to kiss over her collarbone and shoulders, soft as the sweet tinny notes of piano music she plays once on the half-broken instrument at the bottom of the stairs. He remembers the way her hands looked, elegant and soft on the keys, blurred through memory and early morning sunlight. He thought,  _ I love you.  _

The touch of her hand against his side. The way she curls into the armchair in between their fucks, sipping water, unfurling an old notepad upon which to write her lists - small Tess things that seem to capture the essence of her, that soft sharp presence at his shoulder or beneath him or against him, warm honey-sweet the taste of her as her thighs tremble around his cheeks, the soft breathy sounds she makes the whisper sigh of her voice, hearing her move in the other room and knowing she is there. One time when he comes with her to the ration line, and she walks beside him and he can hear her footsteps on the pavement.

When she threw that bottle at him; and he came back the next morning, and he wanted so badly to hold her, but the most she let him hold was her hand and he savored the moment and traced his thumb over the mapwork of blue veins beneath her skin and marveled at how they kept her alive and here with him and prayed that she would always be that way, that he would never see another bruise on her skin as long as he lived, and the softness of the way she squeezed his fingers and how small her hand felt in his and then how much larger, how protective as she laced their fingers together and squeezed gently.

He loves her and does not know how to say it. So instead he tries to tell her in tender touches, putting his hand at the small of her back before he goes, in the way he looks at her. In the notes he leaves her, if he goes after she falls asleep, that he hopes she can get some rest, that thank you, that there are things for her on the countertop (usually faded wildflowers in old broken glasses yellowed with age, an extra card, chocolate, coffee). Tess seems shy about them, or maybe uncomfortable, because she doesn’t bring them up, only treasures them quietly and saves the empty bottles in her cupboards and presses the wildflowers within the pages of her books. He leaves them anyways; something in his day, in himself, is incomplete unless there is a small physical manifestation of that love.

 

\---------

One night Joel goes to her door and she is not there. He tries the usual knocks - sometimes, borne of necessity after that one breakin, that one that left her with stripes of blood down her thighs and cuts from where she’d punched and pulled at jackets and the thick boots holding her down by the neck, they had devised secret ones. One hard rap and two delicate taps right above it. He tries that one, and then a few more. Harder. Softer. She doesn’t answer. He figures maybe she’s out; which would make sense if it weren’t so late, or if she hadn’t always told him: she never leaves, they have to come to her. (Once a girl got stabbed to death, she told him, when she’d gone to the dilapidated motel room of her client and instead found six men waiting with broken bottles and a bag for all the pay she had on her.)

He waits for a while; he can’t help but think of that story, hopes the deadbolt he put on her door works as well as he’d thought. In the morning, he comes back, expecting that surely she’ll be there by now; that the door will open when he completes the characteristic knock, that he will breathe a sigh of relief. Still no Tess appears, though he returns after noon, and again that night.

He’s gone days without seeing her before. There have been times when he’s had to spend the night outside - it’s too risky moving after curfew sets in - and he hasn’t gotten to her, or times when he’s had a drop to make when he’d normally visit her. But after three days he notices that there is a small, fraying hole where Tess’ presence normally is; a few hours set aside at night without her where she should be. He begins to notice missing things: a panel in the stained glass of an old church he finds one afternoon. Where the Virgin Mary’s hand should be, raised in blessing, there is instead a jagged emptiness through which is only white sky. A hole that appears in his shirt after it catches on one of the old containers down at the wharf, tugging and pulling until Joel hears the terrible stretching sound and then the give of the well-worn fabric.

Even the blood that beads when he pricks his finger; noticeable not only because it is a tiny puncture, the cherry-red seeping down his thumbprint, but because he finds that he does not care. In fact the sting is welcome, a visitor, a presence. When he pricks his thumb again he does not fix it right away.

Eventually he stops going to Tess’ place. When he does so for the first time his world feels surreal - his feet want to retrace the familiar steps. He wonders if someone hurt her, killed her and even the thought boils his blood, rage-rivers coursing through his veins as his muscles tense and his head swims. 

“Maybe she just doesn’t want you comin’ ‘round any more,” Tommy says, ribbing him over a beer one night down by the marketplace. It’s the kind of thing brothers are supposed to say, the kind of thing that Joel is meant to scowl at and shove Tommy right back. But it’s true; Joel had never thought of that, he feels ashamed to say, that perhaps it isn’t anything to do with Tess not being entirely able to come downstairs and open the door. That maybe it is much more to do with her being finished with him, perhaps annoyed by him; by his persistence, by his constant presence. He had paid her well enough, hadn’t he? He agonizes over it. He remembers fighting with Tess, sometimes, usually because he’d overstepped the time he was allowed with her (“Tex, saying you can’t spend the night doesn’t mean you can just stay up all night and stay anyways”), but nothing to make her hate him, surely.

Maybe he was imagining things. His mind replays the drunken kiss late at night, a risk he wouldn’t have dared to take that she ended up taking for him. The hard wooden surface of the door supporting his back as he slept in her hallway that night; had she known that he was there? He lies in the dark and watches the ceiling, and during the day when he isn’t trading or collecting or dropping goods off he sits and drinks from the bottles of scotch he gets for payment. He looks at the glass, half-full still, and considers asking them to pay him with something different. The group he trades with is squatting in an old distillery and there are bottles galore, a secret stash that they use to get guns and food and high-quality clothing. He looks at the label -  _ LOWLANDS OLD SCOTCH WHISKEY _ , emblazoned in gold over green.

He downs the rest of the glass, gulping it, tipping it back until the light from his fireplace blurs and distorts behind the old crystal-glass, ugly like it was once in someone’s grandmother’s cabinet out in a floral living room, watches the flames twist and mutate. The scotch burns his throat, his chest, sears all the way down and fans out through his ribs. His tongue is numb and tingling when he sets the glass down. His mind is consumed with phantom thoughts of her voice, his fingers itching and aching and stretching almost involuntarily on the couch. He wants her near to him again, to feel her stretch beneath the sheets and the soft rustle of the pillow as she turned. To feel her lips on his. (He does not know that she had spent the next morning deciding if it was real, then determining it was, then telling herself she had wasted it.)

The next day he visits his distillery group again - more like a pack, they are, all vicious and strict and hierarchical. The leader is a man called Peter and he is the one who takes the stack of .45s from Joel’s arms and distributes them to his men. They look less wolflike and more like dogs as they practically drool over the metal and bullets, and Joel gets the bottle in return. “Oh,” says Peter. “Here. We need you to make a drop for us - that bottle’s for one of our other suppliers, mm? He works out of the address on the label - you can take an extra, if you’d like, as payment - “

Joel narrows his eyes. He is not their messenger boy. He tucks an extra bottle under his arm and, on the way out, the ration cards in a short stack near the doorway. They don’t see him, and Joel picks his way through the underbelly of the south side. This is not a good place, he thinks; he doesn’t want to be here too long, because the sun is nearly set. 

He reaches the address that is marked in black ink on the bottle. It is a deep blue house, shoved in between a factory and an apartment building, dilapidated and deeply neglected. The shingles hang in sheets from the roof, the porch sags, the shutters are pulled closed. The only thing that looks remotely new is the door, polished and shiny, save for the dents and cracks in the wood and the large collection of locks that mark the front door.

He steps onto the porch, listens to the creaking of it beneath his weight. He knocks absentmindedly on the door and is surprised, concerned, when the locks immediately begin to click - someone on the other side is opening them quickly. He looks down at the scotch again.

“Jesus, I thought you’d never come,” and he looks up and Tess looks bright and confused, a bruise blooming on her cheek. “You found that note, didn’t you?” she says, staring at him confusedly. “Couldn’t stay at the old place forever...there were a couple guys who just couldn’t leave well enough alone.” She gestures at the bruise on her cheek. “Come in. It’s nice.”

She stands aside. “Oh, is that for me?” She reaches, takes the bottle from his hands. He drops his own.


	8. full circle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> not everything is black and white

Once a month, she tells him to reschedule for next week. He never has to ask why, but he asks if there’s anything she would need for it. 

Tess always shrugs; she’s a little paler, a little more drained, and he sees a pinch in her brow for most of that time. “I need you fellas to leave a girl alone for a week every month, ‘s that too much to ask?” but he always leaves her chocolate either way. 

“Some of ‘em want it more then,” she tells him, bitter and almost thoughtful as she scoffs at the idea. “Something about blood and pain gets their cocks rock solid.”

She blows out a puff of smoke. "What about you, hm? Does that get you off?"

Joel blushes red. "Doesn't - I wouldn't force myself on you. 'f you didn't want it." 

Tess snorts quietly. "Sure. Lots of 'em tell me that, 'til I start saying no and then suddenly they tell me they just wanted what they pay for, that's all."

He tries not to take offense at this, that she'd ever think he might force himself on her, but he holds his tongue successfully. “You - y’know you can call me, if they ever bother you. Doin’ somethin’ like that ain’t right, even if - they pay you.”

Tess turns away from him, looks out at the salty brine of the wharf instead. The sea-spray coats her cheeks and she exhales more smoke. “D’you know what it’s like to hate yourself?” she asks him. 

_ Yes _ .

She drags her fingertips across the ashy pier, over the jagged concrete that makes it up. “The things people want to  _ do  _ to me, have done to me - I don’t care if they force themselves on me, at this point.” She takes a long drag off the cigarette. “Some men get off on the blood and the pain, yes. Some get off on spitting on me and telling me what a useless, worthless fucking whore I am. Some tell me that they get off on violence, that they like the punching, the kicking, choking.” She presses her lips together almost nonchalantly. “I don’t get a choice.” 

Tess pushes herself up off the pier suddenly, stands as he looks up at her. “So if you think this is different - that you can make all these requests of me, all that kissing and touching - it’s not, all right? ‘s another request.” 

“Yeah? If you can fulfill those other ones,” he says, his fingers tightening on the ledge, “you can give me one, too.”

“Not that.”

“A night to do whatever I want, then.” He stands, brushes his hands off on his jeans. 

“Whatever you want, hmm?” Her face seems to relax. “Well, within reason, old man.”

“Nothing involving blood.” 

She flashes a dry smile. “Whose?”

\--------

He confirms again with her on his night. He doesn’t want to have to constantly remind her, so he does it beforehand: whatever he wants, right? Anything? And Tess nods, sighs, rolls her eyes and tells him to get going. She says she has rope if he wants it, paddles and belts, too. She has a homemade gag for him if he wants to gag her. 

“Whatever you want,” she confirms.

The first thing he does is tell her to sit down on the bed. It is almost concerning to see her so obedient. “Spread your legs,” he commands. She does so, looks almost nervous as she stares up at him. He gets on his knees, and she cannot hide her surprise, and then she shakes as he puts his mouth to her folds. Sucking and licking until she comes undone around him, shaking and whining okay - okay - okay, I said - do - whatever you want, and he nods, whatever he wants, pushes her down against the bed and kisses her ferociously. Tender and fire all at once, kissing down her neck, sucking reverently, the hollow space between her breasts just beneath her heart. Each rib, above her navel, her hipbones, the apex of her thighs. He becomes aware that she is crying and gyrating against his touch and moaning with need and want and confusion, and so when he slides into her he is not surprised that she comes right away. He keeps going anyways. 

She cries and moans and begs for more, and pants, and doesn’t know how or when to kiss him. When he presses his lips to hers she is too eager and rough and he has to pull back, teaching her, almost, reminding her. She tries, goes softer, cries harder, rakes her nails down his back.

He finishes inside of her, once, then twice. He kisses her harder, fucks her harder, and softer, too, and cannot get enough of her, wrapping himself in her body, surrounding himself with her. With the sweet taste of her skin on his lips, soft and smooth; holding her against him as he moves inside of her. Her crying has died down, now soft tears on her cheeks. He doesn’t know how he guessed to not stop, that her tears were not part of what he was doing to her but more because of it, a relief, a catharsis.

He stays inside her for a long while, keeps them connected. He holds her against him, because he mutters against her cheek that if he can do whatever he wants, he would like to hold her. Only if it’s okay, he says. She doesn’t reply, but she edges closer, closer, as close as she can be.

He kisses her forehead. He watches the tears press from her eyelids when he does so. A soft, sweet gesture. Affection. Care.

“There’s somethin’ else,” he says, as she begins to drift off to sleep. She does not try to evict him tonight.

“Whatever you want,” Tess mumbles.

“You.”

**Author's Note:**

> Um? Can't say I've got an explanation for this, but it's one of the universes the wife and I use to vent when there are Bad Days and Angst Days. I say "we", I mean mostly "me".


End file.
